Recently, I had some teens (well, and one tween) over to do some tshirt upcycles. This is pretty much my favorite thing to do — share this frugal, crafty, blind path with the next generation. I already have my homemade holiday gift class forming. Wouldn’t you rather get homemade gifts from kids that were AWESOME rather than of the macaroni variety? I’m not knocking the macaroni but I’ve seen what even young kids can do in creating art. There is no way we can’t then take that and make something really cool with it. And then when you take on the older kids, they can really get crafting.

I chose the projects (only one sewing one since it involved my sewing machine and we had to take turns) and had the kids bring the tshirts and a sharp pair of scissors. The projects we did were:

No sew! Click for tutorial.

Click on the picture for the tutorial.

Awesome, right?

These projects were a huge success. They’re easy to teach, fun to do, and they take up enough time to feel like you really gave the parents’ their money’s worth. Which really doesn’t mean anything because the class was free. But still, they got their money’s worth from the old tshirts and thrift store finds.

Eden’s projects were the ones I used to teach by — the ones I did alongside the kids. And here she is looking like a hot mess of homemade.

She’s colorful in every way.

And here are two of the class participants modeling their new items. The one with dark hair is Lara’s daughter. And the little one didn’t actually make anything in the class but wasn’t about to miss the chance to be in a photograph.

Depending on the size of shirt they started with, they did different things with the back.

If you have any homemade, crafty ideas that I could do with teens and tweens, leave them in the comments. I’m always looking for my next class idea.